I was recently receiving a briefing on a new NAS and happened to mention to
the vendor that a well-known national brick-and-mortar electronics retailer has virtually no NASes on their store shelves. The NAS manufacturer told me that the retailer is cautious with NASes because the NASes they had carried in the past had very high return rates. It seems that the reason consumers were returning NASes was because they couldn’t attach them directly to their computers!
I was floored by this story because of the high interest that NASes receive on SmallNetBuilder, with NAS reviews and the NAS Charts being among the most highly-viewed areas on the site. So surely there is a great deal of interest in and awareness of these products.
But I also have to admit that SmallNetBuilder isn’t a site that my siblings and parents are likely to visit and so probably isn’t reaching or helping to educate the un-geekified of the world about NASes.
So if a friend or family member happens to mention needing to do something about the rapidly-disappearing free space on their computers’ drives, make sure you clue them in on what a NAS can do for them!